Author / DrMabuse

by DrMabuse

Comfort Books

Terry and OGIC have fessed their comfort reading. I thought I’d add to the hue and cry, hoping that other swell folks would do the same. “Comfort reading” has been defined by our dynamic duo as anything that cools down an overheated mind. I’d stretch it a little further and define it as “anything that restores the mind back to its necessary default factory settings.” The following list is by no means a summation of my favorite writers, just the stuff that keeps me personally focused.

1. The Oz books — to restore imaginative settings.
2. Rex Stout — to restore careful balance between wiseass and logic.
3. James M. Cain — to cut the crap and get to the point.
4. Just about anything by Asimov, fiction or nonfiction (his history and science books worked wonders for me as a kid) — to describe things as clearly as possible.
5. Donald Westlake/Richard Stark — to get prose clean and subtextual.
6. Charles Dickens — to replenish color and description.
7. Terry Southern — to restore anti-establishment impulses and ballsiness.
8. John P. Marquand — to remind mind that satire comes in shades and can be accessible.
9. David Lodge — to encourage joie de vivre.
10. Ian McEwan — to respawn impulse to drown babies and revise brutally.

by DrMabuse

Quickies

Primer: Winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The film was made for $7,000, doesn’t appear to have a distribution deal yet, but somehow manages to involve time travel and ethics in its plot. The intricate story has also caused a lot of people to scratch their heads, which has resulted in several unclaimed ski caps left at theatres.

As if the Whitbread isn’t enough, Mark Haddon has walked away with another award — this time, from the South Bank Show. The British literary community is up in arms about this, trying to convince committees that “enough is enough.” An anonymous Important Literary Person has made calls, noting that, while The Curious Dog is a great book, Haddon has simply won too much praise and that there won’t be enough praise for the rest of the books.

Alexandra Ripley, author of Scarlett, has died. Several publishers, upon hearing the news, have been trying to determine which great Ripley book they can pilfer a sequel out of. Unfortunately, Ripley was no Margaret Mitchell. And no publisher wants to be reminded of how much they backed Ripley’s attempt to cash in, let alone the other stuff she wrote.

Prima facie that the New Yorker is overinfluenced by vapid McSweeney’s-like pop cultural riffs: “Boswell’s Life of Jackson”. (And Menudo is referenced in the first sentence. Oh no.)

James Fallows annotates the State of the Union address.

The Boston Globe interviews Tibor Fischer and Fischer comes across, no surprise, as a smug son of a bitch. Not only does he compare himself to Shakespeare, but he lauds cheapshots: “I’m with Amis, and so although in ‘Voyage’ I do have laughs at the expense of foreigners — so did Shakespeare — I also allow characters for whom English is not their first language to express dismay when someone British doesn’t know an arcane piece of English vocabulary: ‘It’s your language,’ they say.”

And to hell with the Golden Globes. How about a real award? Best Lead In A Rising Up and Rising Down Review: “For the past decade, it seemed Sacramento-based novelist William T. Vollmann was neck and neck in a war of prolificacy with Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, and anyone else who would take him on. With ‘Rising Up and Rising Down,’ he has put the issue to rest.” And I truly feel sorry for John Freeman, who, like all reviewers, read all 3,500 pages from a CD-ROM.

Lizzie Grubman (not to be confused with this Lizzie) is returning to the social scene. This may be the first time in New York history that first-hand accounts of road rage are discussed over caviar.

At long last, a New York Times I want to see. (via Old Hag, courtesy of Pullquote)

Pynchon’s voice on The Simpsons. He sounds like an angrier Harvey Pekar. (via Chica)

Francis Ford Coppola quotes Wodehouse! (via At Large)

[1/24/06 UPDATE: Primer, as nearly all film geeks know by now, did manage to nab a DVD distribution deal, leading to enthusiasts working out the multiple timelines. As for the McSweeney’s influence upon the New Yorker (and other places), I should note that litblogs, as much as they claim to be anti-Eggers, are guilty practitioners (including this one).]

by DrMabuse

Well, Goddam

I’m embarassed to confess this, but the end of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time brought tears to my eyes. Everything that Everything is Illuminated tried to be (to somewhat satisfying effect), Dog sure as hell is. The novel appears inspired by the skewered perspectives of Paul Auster, Eric Kraft’s postmodern scrapbook approach, and W.G. Sebald’s penchant for contextual insets. Or not. Only Haddon really knows. But where Auster is content to bullshit with annoying asides, Haddon incorporates his cant into a universe that matters.

If the book was judged solely as a bravura performance of perspective, this would be enough. The narrator’s solipsism, the attempts by tertiary characters to reach out to Christopher, and the fact that the story is written in such an uncompromising way are all laudable. But the novel’s linear approaach matches its protagonist’s scientific mind. The story wends its ways through unexpected twists and a determination to solve a mystery, the great irony being that the mystery is much larger than even Christopher realizes. Christopher’s attempts to apply order, often when surrounded by elements of the world he doesn’t entirely understand, show off his blind spots. The book can be read as a dialectic between the real and the intellectual worlds. But Dog is a brave enough novel to voice the triumphs and weaknesses in prioritizing one world over the other. I came away from the book thinking about how little we accommodate those who are special or off-kilter, and how this willing ignorance often causes these minds to develop in unhealthy, emotional ways.

And that’s why anyone interested in literature should read this book immediately. That is, if they haven’t already.

[1/24/06 UPDATE: As to the question of what Haddon does for an encore, his followup is a chapbook of poetry called The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea.]